Must-Have Should-Have, Could-Have and Won’t-have are buckets you should sort ideas into. If you have trouble moving items away from Must to Should, Could or Won’t then assign a fictitious monetary value to spend on each item and that will help you decide what is more important.

Do research your idea for market fit/need, competition, complexity, legal and validate ideas early. It’s best to find out early that Google will quote $60,000+ TAX a year to allow you to use Google map’s in your app early, then you can use https://www.mapbox.com for $499 a year.

Do you have competition?

Some people say “don’t develop an app that already exists”. Why would you develop a new Uber app? Henry Ford did make a new transportation mode when people were happy with horses, other car manufacturers like Tesla are moving in on the space so don’t be discouraged.

Landing Page

A landing page with a signup form (Newsletter and Register Interest) form is a good way to validate ideas and get feedback early (I would suggest you use a free Mainchimp signup form, a generated website with Platforma on a $5/m server for quick results). There is no point coding and launching to crickets.

Do you have an app Prototype or Mock-Up?

This is very important and easy step. Programs like Adobe XD CC (read my guide here) and Balsamiq can help you prototype an app, Platforma can help you prototype web apps.

Have you validated your idea (app) with end users?

If you don’t do this you are mad. Watch this video to see lessons learned from Trades Cloud.

Is this app idea a hobby (passion)?

This can help you limit costs and expectations. Cheap serves exist (read here and here).

Do you have time to develop/manage this?

Developing and managing an app and planning (paying for) development cycle can be time-consuming and mentally draining.

Can you code?

Do you need to hire developers or learn to code? Blog post coming soon on how to hire coders.

Do you have funds?

Having funds on hand to set up and build an app is very important.

Do you want to hide developers (or get Venture Capital)?

This can help you get moving but you will have to give away a slice of the profits and or IP, managing mentors and VC’s can be tiresome.

Have you set failure criteria (post-mortem)?

Read this page on lessons learned from over 200 startup failures, save your favourites. Having realistic goals and limits is a wise idea, do stop when you reach preset limits.

Do you have a business case?

There are plenty of business case generator template, you will want to document some of the following.

Before you code (or hire coders) use source code versioning software like GitHub and Bitbucket (guides here and here). You want to retain the code and insist on owning it.

Product Goal

Simon Sinek has a good video on companies (or Products) being in a finite or infinite game.

Are you in full control of your development stack?

If you are not a developer you may not care if you are in control, but you will if there are issues with hired developers or issues with service providers. I moved from CPanel to self-managed servers, moved from IBM Cloudant to Digital Ocean to AWS then Vultr servers where I can have full control or scalability, features, security and costs.

Can you forecast the costs?

Lowering cost and boosting performance is important and having spare money is a good thing.

I read recently that Telsla is burning through $6,000 a minute and is forecast to need something like 2 billion dollars in the next 2 years. Software as Service platforms will drain your budget quick (they do take on some risk and maintenance tasks), is this worth it?

It is easy to deploy servers to the cloud within a few minutes, you can have a cloud-based server that you (or others can use). ubuntu has a great guide on setting up basic security issues but what do you need to do.

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If you do not secure your server expect it to be hacked into. Below are tips on securing your cloud server.

Always use update software, malicious users can detect what software you use with sites like shodan.io (or use port scan tools) and then look for weaknesses from well-published lists (e.g WordPress, Windows, MySQL, node, LifeRay, Oracle etc). People can even use Google to search for login pages or sites with passwords in HTML (yes that simple). Once a system is identified by a malicious user they can send automated bots to break into your site (trying millions of passwords a day) or use tools to bypass existing defences (Security researcher Troy Hunt found out it’s child’s play).

[DEFAULT]
# "ignoreip" can be an IP address, a CIDR mask or a DNS host. Fail2ban will not
# ban a host which matches an address in this list. Several addresses can be
# defined using space separator.
ignoreip = 127.0.0.1 192.168.1.0/24 8.8.8.8

Restart the service

sudo service fail2ban restart
sudo service fail2ban status

Intrusion detection (logging) systems

Tripwire will not block or prevent intrusions but it will log and give you a heads up with risks and things of concern

tip: Download manual antivirus update definitions. If you only have a 512MB server your update may fail and you may want to stop fresh claim/php/nginx and mysql before you update to ensure the antivirus definitions update. You can move this to a con job and set this to update at set times over daemon to ensure updates happen.

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